Gwyneth Paltrow is opening up about turning to alcohol during the devastating Los Angeles wildfires.
The Oscar-winning actress got candid during a recent conversation with Dr. Mary Claire Haver — a board-certified OB-GYN, certified menopause practitioner and author of The New Menopause — on The Goop Podcast.
“I’m really in the thick of it right now, so I’m all over the place,” Paltrow said of her menopause symptoms. “But I noticed my symptoms are, like, pretty well under control unless, you know, in January when the fires were happening in LA. I’ve, like, used alcohol for its purpose. I was medicating.”
The Iron Man actress shared that while she and her husband, Brad Falchuk, were not directly impacted by the January fires that ravished the Pacific Palisades and Altadena, “so many of our close friends have lost everything”. It was during her “deep grief” after the fires that “I think I drank every night,” Paltrow admitted.
“Normally, now at this point, I don’t drink a lot at all. Maybe I’ll have one drink a week,” she said. However, Paltrow found that her menopausal symptoms “were completely out of control” when she was drinking every night, adding, “It was the first time I really noticed, like, causation in that way.”
Haver offered in response, “Lots of my patients say the same thing. They’ve really just spontaneously realized that they’ve cut back on alcohol or just quit altogether because it just hasn’t been worth it. They don’t bounce back the same way. It stays in our system a lot longer.”
Dozens of celebrities were among the tens of thousands who lost their homes and businesses in the fires that swept across L.A. At least 29 people were also killed.